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Thursday, 25 June 2015

Shareholders
and politicians on Thursday urged the nation’s top utilities to
exit nuclear power as the central government moves to restart
reactors idled by public safety fears in the wake of the triple core
meltdown in Fukushima Prefecture in 2011.

Despite a number of antinuclear proposals pushed at the
shareholders’ meetings, however, officials from the utilities said
this week they were eager to restart nuclear power plants as soon as
possible after their businesses were staggered by the halt of all
commercial nuclear reactors in the country after 3/11.

Nine utilities with nuclear plants, including the biggest, Tokyo
Electric Power Co., which manages the meltdown-hit Fukushima No. 1
power station — held their general shareholders’ meetings at a
time when a nuclear power plant in the southwest is preparing go back
online this summer for the first time under tighter post-Fukushima
safety requirements.

Japan, which relies heavily on imported energy, invested heavily
in nuclear power for decades, making withdrawal from what some
believe to be a cheaper, less-polluting power source a difficult
proposition to swallow.

At Tepco’s meeting, Katsutaka Idogawa, former mayor of the town
of Futaba — which has been rendered uninhabitable by radiation
contamination — said pulling out of atomic power is “the only way
for the company to survive.”

Tepco, as the utility is known, has “forced people who were
living peacefully into a situation like hell . . . I propose that
Tepco break away from nuclear power,” the mayor said. Futaba
co-hosts the Fukushima No. 1 plant.

Officials from Kansai Electric Power Co., which held its
shareholders meeting in Kobe for the first time in many years, faced
a barrage of tough questions about nuclear power, its decision to
raise prices, and its ¥148.3 billion net loss in fiscal 2014.

Kepco faced sharp criticism for hiking household rates 8.36
percent at the beginning of the month because, as it acknowledges,
its 11 commercial reactors are still idle, forcing it to rely more on
imported fossil fuels. That was a sore point Thursday with
politicians representing cities that hold Kepco shares.

Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, one of the utility’s harshest
critics, was not present Thursday but submitted a motion together
with the city of Kyoto calling on Kepco to get out of nuclear power.
The motion was voted down. Osaka owns about 9.4 percent of Kepco’s
stock.

Kepco’s heavy losses and its plans to restart reactor Nos. 3 and
4 at the Takahama plant in Fukui Prefecture — despite a provisional
injunction from the Fukui District Court in April — prompted calls
from many shareholders for management, especially Chairman Shosuke
Mori and President Makoto Yagi, to resign. But they and 14 other
senior executives were re-elected.

“Nuclear power is part of the national energy policy, an
important baseload. For reasons of energy security, economics, and
reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we need to restart the reactors,”
Yagi said at a news conference in Osaka on Thursday afternoon.

Shareholders expressed worries about how Kepco will adjust to the
full deregulation of the electricity market next year, which is
expected bring new, more flexible competition for electricity service
at a time when the company is financially strapped.

In Fukuoka, shareholders at Kyushu Electric Power Co., which is
looking to restart its Sendai nuclear plant in Kagoshima Prefecture
in August, proposed that the president be dismissed, saying his
stance of continuing nuclear power has hurt earnings.

But President Michiaki Uriu told the meeting that the utility
“aims to restart nuclear reactors as soon as possible on the
premise that securing safety is the priority.”

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to reactivate reactors that meet
safety regulations beefed-up by the new nuclear regulator that was
set up after the Fukushima crisis. The majority of the public,
however, remains opposed.